Just another WordPress.com site

I found this weeks readings to be the most interesting and progressive so far in the course. While the whole ‘virtual reality’ concept has been around for quite a substantial period, sadly the technologies available to the wider population have never really been suitable for a successful measure of virtuality. I suppose the only real taste that most of us have had of virtual reality is through cheesy nineties Sci-Fi films and fairy flimsy Wii sports games/ arcade games such as this now highly amusing short doco – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP8wSw4bBuA.

A few weeks back I started thinking how incredible it was that such a large percentage of this generation are carrying around devices (smart-phones,) which could be so suitable for virtual applications. With such amazing clarity and quite a high res camera it seems like the perfect time for a new digital wave of virtual/ augmented reality applications. The article, ‘7 Ways Augmented Reality Will Improve Your Life,’ explains how, “it’s a way to use technology to redefine space, and it places a virtual layer over the world with geographic specificity ensuring a good fit.”

The article ‘Monkey’s move and feel Virtual Objects Using Only Their Brians’ from Science Daily, explains the “two-way interaction between a primate brain and a virtual body,” highlighting the notion that in the near future quadriplegic patients may be able to use this style of augmented technology to recreate movement lost.

I found this weeks course material to be particularly interesting as it focused on the notion of the ‘extended mind,’ or ‘consciousness.’ To start, I found that the video of Alan Kay teaching tennis fascinating and it seemed to sum up the notion of experience quite well.

Alva Noe spoke of consciousness and movement in his video, ‘dance as a way of knowing. I interpreted his theory as, without movement we would not understand or be conscious or aware. Alva Noe explains, “experience is something we do, that we achieve actively.” If we move back to Kay’s video on tennis it is interesting first of to hear this idea that, “anyone is able to learn how to have a decent game of tennis in under half an hour.” The immediate response that I had was that this is a ridiculous notion, simply because everyone is different and a large percentage of people would not have the co-ordination, movement or understanding to play the game in that short amount of time. What was interesting about the lesson though was the focus Kay had on movement and contact. Rather than analysing the specific actions in the game the instructor just asked the woman who was selected to watch the ball and say “bounce” when the ball hit the ground and “hit” when she thinks she would make contact with racquet and ball. The same went for her serve, Kay making her sing “da-da-dum” to the motion of a serve. Whilst her first few attempts were fairly basic, after a while you began to see the theory working the action of swinging at the ball being controlled by the body rather than the brain.

Looking at Dalton S’ video ‘E Sense,’ we begin to see a connection between all three readings thus far, in the sense that all theorists had a strong idea about the nature of movement and experience. The video documents a new technology aimed at those who are visually impaired. The invention acts as a sensory guide, using pads wrapped around the stomach and waist, vibrations on different areas of the device providing a spacial guide to where objects may be in relation to the participant. This means when a ball is rolled towards the person using the device vibrations are able to guide them towards where the ball is.

Ultimately these theorists highlight the importance of the relationship between movement and the human consciousness, illuminating the idea that our experience is reliant on a combination of these two elements.

What Levinsen seems to allude to in, ‘The Alphabet and Rise of Monotheism,’ using the example of the Pheonician phonetic alphabet is the idea that humans function in a very autonomous and forward thinking way. Levinsen writes that, “the advantage of this atomization, as in instant coffee and digitized information in the twentieth century, is an enormous boost in transportability and preservability.” This parallels to his statement earlier which suggests that we are “indeed an alphabetic culture.”

Connecting this idea to the likes of Monotheism, Levinsen explains how Christianity the most popular Monotheistic religion to date is also the most iconic, emphasising the, “primacy of words in the Good Book.” What the author is suggesting in this sense is the possible redundancy of visual imagery in relation to other less popular religions, a little like the hieroglyphic system. It is this Pheonician system that can be credited for is role in the growth of literacy and language.

Levinsen writes how, “democracy was defined in ancient Athens in terms of the number of people who could hear the speaker’s voice, even as the alphabet created an intellectual structure that millennia later would allow democracy on a national scale.” Though literacy at first created a greater social divide, as we have discussed in earlier years of media technologies such as the Gutenberg press as well as earlier mediums such as parchment thoroughly improved forms of accessibility for the greater social circuit.

“The coupling of biology and technology, which, of course, has longer roots beyond digital culture, finds alive and kicking within the media ecology of digital culture. These types of couplings can also provide vectors of becoming for a novel understanding of digital culture. Life does not remain a mere metaphor but also becomes an implication of autopoiesis, of self-moving, of acting and force.” (Parikka 2007:26)

I take this quote from Thomas Rawlings, ‘Games as a happening, as a Service.’ Implicitly we can use this notion of ‘autopoiesis,’ where we are in some way still using technologies or mediums in the same way that the alphabet was originally designed for which is to create a stronger relationship in society through media relationships or media ecologies. Linking this back to the idea of ‘metacommunication,’ I guess the key idea is at the core of the human structure is something that keeps us wanting to update and improve our networking abilities and be able to connect and relate to the community around us, which is essentially why tools such as print journalism, social networks, smartphones ect. are so darn popular.

Taking into consideration the intimate act of writing a blog, I will continue to establish my own interpretation of what a ‘Media Event’ is in relation to this weeks readings.

Essentially, a ‘Media Event,’ could mean a lot of things depending on the context of the term. The initial idea that springs to mind when I think of a ‘Media Event,’ is possibly a piece of news or information that has been reported on by some kind of journalistic medium. On page 12 of ‘Culture and Technology,’ the writer refers to technological change as being “autonomous” or independent of “social pressures.” I suppose the connection I first make to what Media is, is something that is heavily influenced by technology. The semiotics of the word event on the other hand feels to me, like a period in time where something significant takes place. If we combine these two words, it becomes clearer why the idea journalism and news comes to mind, which itself is in a way fairly autonomous.

Between July 2012- January 2013, I was fortunate enough to be able to help out and intern at an events company in Sydney. This organisation is very well known for putting on music festivals across Australia. My role in the company was titled ‘touring intern,’ which was mainly involved with looking after the acts who were to eventually play at these festivals being put on. The reason I bring this up, is because not only did the company play such an important role in the events scene in Australia, but they also relied strongly on the importance of media as a platform to promote their festivals or events. This is another example of how we are able to view a ‘Media Event.’

In ‘Culture and Technology,’ the author explains McLuhan’s basic notion that, “all technologies are human capacities. Tools and implements are extensions of manual skills; the computer is an extension of the brain.” With this theory in mind, the importance of autonomous technologies and media are substantial. In terms of promoting events, the festival company would rely heavily on the power of media platforms to advertise their events.

1. ‘It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves—the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public—has stopped being a problem.’ (Clay Shirky, ‘Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable’,http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/). Are digital and networked media dismantling the “publishing industry”? Is it being replaced? If so, what is replacing it? If not, what is the publishing industry becoming, and how is it doing so? Are there new difficulties and complexities or expenses involved?

Throughout the course of human existence the act of publishing has been an extremely important and powerful tool used to benefit the development and growth of society. Joost Van Loon writes in ‘Network’ that “the network has been highly conducive to theorising phenomena and processes such as globalisation, digital media (Internet), speed, symbiosis and complexity.” [http://tcs.sagepub.com.wwwproxy0.library.unsw.edu.au/content/23/2-3/307] If we analyse these elements that have attributed to the growth of networks and communities we can see that they are all linked to the notion of publishing, growth and communication. Publishing is essentially a platform for the distribution of information to the greater community, the term ‘publishing’ stemming from the the notion to “make something public or generally well known.”

Clay Shirky explains in his article ‘Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,’ “when someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution” [http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/]. The writer ultimately warns the reader about the dangers of naivety and oversight for those loyal to print media. Shirky makes an interesting observation, comparing the printing revolution, inherently understood as an result of Gutenberg’s Printing Press, to the “revolution” we are experiencing now, as more and more physical content is being replaced with digital information. What is interesting about Shirky’s comparison, is that in both circumstances there was and is an uncertainty as to how these revolutions or changes were and are affecting society and in what direction these advancements in technology will take us.

The key quote illuminated in the assessment question, focuses on whether, “it makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because of the core problem publishing solves.” What Shirky is alluding to in this quote is the notion that, due to the immediacy and availability of digital content the publishing industry, once an extremely powerful and influential enterprise is becoming redundant. Caroline Basset explains in ‘Digital Media’ that, “divisions between traditionally complementary approaches, based on a division between the sphere of the literary and the sphere of life itself, may need to be rethought” [http://ywcct.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/1/138.full]. Both Basset and Shirky seem to stress the importance of change and adaptation, regarding traditionalism and loyalty to print media as simply unrealistic and a form of idealism.

In the era prior to the “movable type,” literacy rates were low and education was restricted to members of the aristocracy and members of the Catholic Church. Based on earlier screw presses the German Johannes Gutenberg, designed a model that could print around three and a half thousand pages per work day as opposed around forty hand written pages. This was undeniably a far more effective method, not only for printing information, but later for receiving and understanding content. During the 1500’s literacy rates boomed, Shirky explaining how as “books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.” Aldus Manutius, Venetian printer and publisher, benefitted the printing industry greatly with the invention of the ‘octavo’ volume,’ as well as italic type, redefining both the size and portability of what we now perceive as the everyday book.

Phil Kurz explains ‘Broadcast Engineering,’ that “the Web is an unlimited opportunity to expand the idea of localism to the umpteenth degree” [http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=7eb5179a-0ce3-4d1d-a350-6d151e072002%40sessionmgr13&vid=2&hid=19%5D. Shirky conclusively contributes the decline of the printing press to the expense of its processes. The writer acknowledges the notion that “for a long time, longer than anyone in the newspaper business has been alive in fact, print journalism has been intertwined with these economics.” Prior to any form of digitisation, the newspaper was essentially the only media outlet, meaning that a handful of newspapers in specific areas were able to create a complete oligopoly within the media market. Though the process of printing was an extremely costly and labour intensive process, newspapers had little in the way of modes of competitors in other meaning that information was extremely difficult to plagiarise and share information.

What Shirky deems to be the main downfall of the newspaper was the print corporations failure to accept and even comprehend the worse possible scenario. Shirky explains that, “the problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming,” merely that they could not fathom the extent that the internet would revolutionise the sharing and freedom of information. While television expanded and popularised the idea of visually stimulating media, the web 2.0 created an immediacy and non-linear format for information content to move around. Most of all the internet gave to generations following the notion that information and all data should be free.

Michael Erard writes in, ‘A short Manifesto on the Future of Our Attention,’ how political scientist Herbert Simon in 1971 believed that, “the more information, the less attention, and the need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it,” [http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=10297]. This immediacy or ability for information to move in a lucid and almost live manner completely revolutionised how we interact with media content. Shirky tells how, “the unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking.” Ultimately what the internet provided, was a borderless space for content to grow and move within, triggering an unimaginable boom within the digital network.

If we go back to the definition of ‘publishing’ we can see that it isn’t restricted to purely print media. While the term builds connotations or stigmas about physically printing, the idea of “making something public or generally well known,” extends past the boundaries of the physical. In answer to the question of whether the internet is deteriorating and dismantling the publishing industry my personal conclusion is no, simply due to the reason that digital media if anything is making information more widely available and received to the general public in an endless array of formats. What digital media is dissolving though is print media, and one of the reasons, as Erard explains is that “making something ‘free’ is obviously an allocation strategy. ‘Free’ attracts attention. Making things brief is an allocation strategy as well.”

Erard’s insite leads into the question of what the publishing industry is becoming, and how the idea of ‘free’ information is affecting standards of journalism. Shirky writes how “the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make it any less accidental.” Though the newspaper industry had complete control over the media market for almost two centuries, their practices had developed to the point where a professional standard was expected of all newspapers, and any libel or falsities would lead to legal disputes and prosecutions. The closure of the ‘News of the World’ on the July 10 2011, ended 168 years of publication. The closure was entirely due to misconduct by certain journalists at the paper, illuminating how people engage with journalism and hold a certain expectation for the standards of it. One could question whether the expectation of paper sales triggered the desperation to provide interesting content at any cost.

So what has been newspapers response to the digital revolution? While many have attempted to appropriate the newspaper and simply adapt it to the form of an online journal, the digital paper in many ways has failed to succeed due to the immediacy and availability of information on the web. Shirky poses the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” answering his own question with the idea that “nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.” While Shirky’s idea of the future of journalism is a fairly bleak and cynical, Johnah Lehrer writes in ‘The Future of Reading,’ “I also recognize the astonishing potential of digital texts and e-readers. For me, the most salient fact is this: It’s never been easier to buy books, read books, or read about books you might want to buy. How can that not be good?”

Unfortunately the speed that is expected from media websites is almost unimaginable and at times unmanageable, which in some ways has turned reporting into more of a race or competition. This has in many ways has lowered the quality of journalism as sources and stories are copied and often not double-checked. While this is an extremely negative side-effect of the digitalisation of journalism, the need for quality journalism is still present and possibly even more relevant in this day and age. Shirky explains how, “now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.” Erard writes how he imagines “attention-based pricing, in which prices of information commodities are inversely adjusted to the cognitive investment of consuming them.” Though media platforms are being reshaped and are evolving, the appreciation and willingness people have to invest in quality journalism may just be the saving grace for the industry.

The popularity of the Apple ‘Ipad’ and Amazon’s ‘Kindle’ at the very least gives hope to journalists and media enthusiasts that there still is a platform for publishing news and information. According to Shaw Wu of Sterne Agee, ‘Ipad’ sales for the year of 2012 should reach upwards of 55 million. The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolutionitself like?” If books and printing improved literacy rates in the 1500’s then surely the opportunity to gain greater exposure of information in the 21st century will improve our thirst for information and knowledge in relation to good journalism. In many ways we should be grateful that the publishing industry has lost it’s bureaucratic threshold, as it has created numerous opportunities for smaller agencies and entrepreneurs. Shirky explains how, “many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.”

Shirky vindicates the notion that, “society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable.” What is becoming ostensible is the notion that there will always be some form of quality journalism in the digital age. While there is still some hope for print media Shirky writes, “what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.” Ultimately we should use this time to experiment with new ideas and methods of publishing, while at the same time keeping in mind the importance for truthful and well written journalism and with this the “publishing industry” shall not be lost.

Platforms can be understood as a structural or technological form from which various products can emerge without the expense of a new process/technology introduction. They are essential for supporting specific content particularly in a world where categorising and ordering information is quintessential. Platforms can be digital and physical, whilst they play an important role in connecting people and information. In the article ‘Assembling Collective Thought,’ Anna Munster and Andrew Murphy explain how, “so much new media composition and production still concerns itself with technological conduits and infrastructure.” The idea behind ACT simply put is to create a different platform for interaction and patterns of information.

Personally I am very much interested the website ‘Soundcloud,’ a music platform as it allows me to share and make my own music available to other musicians. It operates as a free website, until you use up a certain amount of memory on the site and after that you are able to pay for additional space and other perks as a greater download capacity for people listening to your music. The platform serves completely as a virtual space concentrating specifically on digital music content.

Evidently ‘Soundcloud’ also works as a platform between other social networking sites. This is an extremely important tool especially in terms of marketing for the network.

The popularity of many of these networking sites has blossomed from the interactive and interpersonal attributes which they offer. Whilst platforms use to be purely for companies and corporations to market their own products and interests, some of the most successful companies in the 21st century are in fact these platforms in which the public interact with.If we take a look at the website VjTheory.net their mission statement explains how “the website is a growing collection of articles, references and art projects in collaboration with contributors from the book and the growing community.” Again this idea of a network or a platform introduces the notion of a community, where it is the people who are the most important part of the medium. Similarly social networking sites such as ‘Facebook,’ ‘Twitter,’ ‘Flikr’ and ‘Tumblr’ all inhabit and explore personal themes within their marketing scheme in order to illuminate their role as a place for personal communication, a digital conversation as such.

Another interesting aspect of the digital platform is its ability to connect with the physical. Websites such as ‘Amazon’ and ‘Ebay’ are able to order and store digital content and act as a platform for online buyers to purchase physical objects. A particular legal loophole which has opened up in the last few years has been the trading of illegal goods online. The ‘Silk Road,’ has been a major international contention for a large number of governments as the site acts as a platform for trading physical items digitally allowing strong anonymity. Using a currency known as bitcoins, a crypto-currency, buyers are able to purchase illegal items and substances through anonymous auctions. An administrator claims “over 99% of all transactions conducted within the escrow system are completed to the satisfaction of both buyer and seller, or a mutually agreed upon resolution is found.

One could say the internet itself was a platform for other platforms, so essentially the digital or virtual world is just a construct dependent on people and platforms to connect information. It will be extremely interesting to see how these platforms develop and change over time acting as gateways or paths into a new era of intermediacy.

The subject of visual forms of media working differently to other platforms for information is an interesting one, and cannot just be simplified with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. While different mediums of communication such as a video or photograph clearly function in antithetical ways to say something in writing, if they are both communicating the same idea, in a way they are performing the same role, working as a platform for this particular message.

The web has undoubtably seen the rise of the ‘visualisation,’ where in a way the importance of the written word has declined and the aesthetics and measures of visual communications have soared. This can be mainly linked to the effectiveness of the visual media form, where a simple design or graphic is able to convey a staggering amount of information. This can undoubtably be traced back to the earliest forms of photo-communication in old advertisements such as this one for Coca-Cola-[http://www.thatsrich.com/pics/cocacola/images/image008_2.jpg]. The image has clearly conveyed a number of positive ideas about the product with little emphasis on the written word. Using this semiotic principal of using signs and meaning the ‘visualisation’ similarly is able to communicate a gross amount of content and information simply through a visual representation. If we examine this brief article entitled, ‘Tracking & Visualising the use of Software Applications,’ we are able to see how a program takes date and changes its form into a visual image. The article explains how “this tracked data is stored in a text file, which can be uploaded and then visualised. Individual software programs are represented by different colours.” [http://infosthetics.com/archives/2012/05/threadwatch_tracking_and_visualizing_the_use_of_software_applications.html]

In many ways this visual mode of communication is beginning to take control of the media market. The recent drop in Fairfax shares alongside other print media companies suggests that the decreasing popularity of these mediums are being lost to online journalism, which unquestionably depends on aesthetics and visual materials to capture peoples attention. In this sense one could argue that the visual form of communication is far more effective in simply communicating an idea.

If we take a minute to analyse even a fairly small screenshot of todays homepage of the SMH website we are able to see how the majority of the information on the page is visual and our eyes are drawn to the images and graphics on the page. The writing here almost works as an aid or caption to assist the visual mode.

In a recent article in the economist entitled ‘Data, data everywhere,’ James Cortada a computer scientist for IBM explains that, “we are at a different period because of so much information. The effect is being felt everywhere, from business to science, from government to the arts.” As a result of this, it is important that we uncover new methods of projecting these great masses of information. The popularity of new media platforms such as ‘Twitter’ and ‘Instagram’ is due to the simplicity in the format of these programs. ‘Twitter’ only allows for a 140 characters per post, stressing an importance for concise and accurate communications. It seems like the same format is being applied to many platforms with a great amounts of information, the visual simplicity of a website a key factor of its popularity.

Ultimately the great mass of content that todays generation are expected to take in has generated a need for visual simplicity. In this sense visual media works in a more concentrated form, although the message still stays the same.